Guiding Science: Publications
by Women in the Romantic and Victorian Ages is an annotated bibliography
of 200 women-authored science books for children and young readers from
1790-1890 which were published in Great Britain and the United States.
Included in the bibliography are all editions of a title held at the
Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature at the George A.
Smathers Libraries, University of Florida.
Support for this project was
provided by a 2015 American Library Association Carnegie Whitney
grant.
Guiding Science:
Publications by Women during the Romantic and Victorian
Ages
By Dr. Alan Rauch,
University of North Carolina - Charlotte
The emergence of science as a popular subject
in conversation for readers young and old is rarely explored in depth.
Modern science and scientific knowledge flourished in the
19th century, but what did people actually know about
sciences and how did they know it? The answers to these question are
complex, but one thing is certain, the so-called rising generation of
the 19th century gleaned most of its knowledge about animals,
plants, geology, physics, and natural philosophy from books written by
female authors.
Women at the time were excluded from
practicing as scientists, and thus from demonstrably adding new
knowledge to the world; still, they were deeply invested in making
science comprehensible and available to readers. They wrote widely and
prolifically, sometimes with an eye to revealing God in the natural
world, and other times to highlight critical knowledge for an
increasingly scientific and technical age. The object of their efforts
was almost always summarized as “mental improvement.” While their
readers included great scientists such as Michael Faraday and Charles
Darwin, it is far more compelling to think of the thousands of other
readers who helped shape the 19th century, each in their anonymous way.
Many of these women writers were themselves
anonymous, known to us simply as Anon, A Lady, or by a set of initials
accompanied by a gendered pronoun in a preface. Some authors, like Maria
Hack, Catherine Louisa Beaufort, Mary Elliott, and Selina Bower, are
either poorly known or entirely forgotten despite their impact on young
readers. Others, such as Maria Edgeworth, Sarah Trimmer, Jane Marcet,
and Priscilla Wakefield, while recognized as important literary figures,
rarely receive credit for making science available and fascinating to
everyone.
All of this simply underscores how overdue
acknowledgement for the importance of women in the modern sciences still
is, and how behind we still are in understanding science networks among
women in the 19th century. There was a vast matrix of scientific writing
for children, richly represented in the Baldwin Library, which we are
only beginning to value as foundational. The purpose of this exhibit is
not only to help unearth these remarkable works, but to assemble them in
a way that celebrates their significance - the readers of these books
were being schooled for England’s scientific and industrial revolution.
We can, perhaps, be forgiven for thinking that male educators were
responsible for this transformation, but that was simply not the case.
It was women who transformed the natural order.
Questions and comments about this project may be
submitted to the Libraries Web Team.